Dainty Sichuan on Toorak Road – so hot right now

Believe the hype. Our visit to Dainty Sichuan last night completely lived up to my expectations:

Kitsch meets arty decor. Check. Surly service. Check. BYO wine. Thankfully, check. Food so delicious and mouth-tinglingly spicy we forgot to take a photo until we had managed to eat half of it. Check.

Fantastic kung pao chicken – sticky, caramelised sauce studded with fragrant dried chillies and crunchy peanuts – and thin strips of twice-cooked pork belly. Beautifully moist with a thin layer of melt-in-the-mouth fat. With $2 serves of rice and $2 per person BYO wine this place is a bargain – main courses are a generous size too, so perfectly acceptable to ask for a doggy bag. Hot, hot, hot – this is a Melbourne must.

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“THERE’S an award-winning blog in Melbourne that does an impressive job of keeping everyone up to speed on just about every opening in the city, from food truck to grand diner.
The blog has a Twitter account where you can get a running feed on all sorts of stuff to do with food and beverage culture in the city on the Yarra.
The team behind the brand – for that is what it is, a brand – are social media masters. I dips me lid. They have presences on Facebook, Pinterest and Instagram as well.”
- John Lethlean, National restaurant reviewer for The Australian and The Weekend Australian Magazine.
Welcome, and thanks for visiting Sharking for Chips and Drinks. We are a food and travel writer-photographer team, originally from London, now based in Melbourne.
We both have day jobs, but when we aren’t committed to the 9 till 5 grind we regularly contribute to a number of food and travel publications and websites in Australia and overseas, including:
Beer and Brewer magazine and The Ultimate Beer Guide
Melbourne Coffee Review handbook, website and iPhone app
Food and Drink guides covering London, Buckinghamshire and Berkshire
Elite Traveler magazine (US and Asia market luxury travel)
Gap Daemon website (international backpacker travel)
Currently we have a number of commissions in the pipeline. We have been featured in The Age’s Epicure supplement several times, most notably within a cover story focusing on Melbourne’s lunchtime dining scene. See for yourself here. After a very successful 2012, we started this year on a high when it was announced we had won the Expedia Blogger of the Year Competition – this means we have even more exciting adventures coming up in the next few months.
While we are currently living in Melbourne, we regularly return to our beloved London and have a very global view – this year will see us head to Italy, Japan and Korea in search of gourmet gems.